SOUL SEARCHIN’…

During my younger, more impressionable days, I believed in soul mates. You know that one person that fate would lead you to who could calm your fears, stimulate your mind, protect your emotions, love your body and soothe your pain. I TRULY believed that there was ONE person out there, somewhere, perfectly suited for ME. I didn’t think they had to be like me, they could be whoever they were, holding their own idealogies and belief systems as they complemented mine. A few years later this thinking changed. I started believing that maybe my soul mate could be a female, like my best sister friend and not necessarily a guy I was dating or one I wanted to marry. Now I’m convinced there isn’t one person for anybody who can fulfill all of our needs, at any given time, to the degree that we need them fulfilled in order to be satisfied. For the most part, finding someone who can activate a few or a portion of all these life-giving stimuli is what the majority of us are looking for. The rest of us are just searching for space fillers because we are afraid of living our lives alone.

Life, love, happiness and heartache have influenced my views on relationships, hence, my definition of a soul mate has changed dramatically. NOW I think a soul mate isn’t one person for whom we’re perfectly matched but a series of people who are put in our lives for a reason, a season or a lifetime based on our needs at any given moment. So….a person can have one or two soul mates while another can have 10 or 20. Having multiple soul mates doesn’t guarantee that all of a person’s needs will be fulfilled but because the soul is the immaterial essence of a human being – where their spirit lives – God is forever present. And because God is all-knowing, his presence allows for certain people to share our lives and feed our souls by fulfilling some or all of our most pressing needs, to a greater or lesser degree, so that our lives may become purposeful, joyous and blessed. Trust and believe, the people in your life are not there by accident or happenstance – they serve a purpose. The beauty of life’s journey is learning what that purpose is and how you were forever changed, for the good or for the bad, because of it.

One of my sister girls posted an article from the Huff Post on FB this afternoon entitled “Is There Such a Thing as a Soul Mate.” As I read the article I agreed, for the most part, with what the author was saying. Their perspective was very similar to mine in that the limitations placed on a relationship by searching for one person to fulfill your physical, mental, emotional and sexual needs is self-defeating and can cause the relationship to end before it even begins. Where we differed was in the thought that “the soul cannot mate with anything, nor does the soul need a mate because it is absolute and boundless. Only what is limited needs a mate in order to feel a little better.” As I see it, only in an ideal world with everything existing in its pure state, would a soul NOT need a mate. And even though the soul has the CAPACITY to be absolute and boundless, it’s the actual presence of others for whom we serve and who properly serve us that enables us to reach our fullest potential, moving us closer to healthy, pleasing relationships which are a lot like “living in a beautiful garden.” Soul mates are there to guide us, reach us, teach us and feed us the proper sustenance for the nourishment of our mind and spirit. They touch our lives in the most profound ways, we often wonder how we’ve gotten along without them. Before I leave you, I’ll echo what the article stated about being honest with yourself and understanding that the beauty of life and it’s most precious moments exist because of the most basic things. Plug into life and become enlightened by all that it is and all that it has to offer. Until tomorrow youngn’s.